Today, we’re starting an invite-only beta for Stripe in India with a small group of companies. These businesses will help us test our platform in the Indian market and provide feedback on features that we’ll need to build to support all Indian businesses looking to accept online payments and run their companies on Stripe.

Supporting Indian entrepreneurs is critical to our mission of expanding the GDP of the internet. Now more than ever, India is uniquely positioned to move more commerce online: In just the past two years, the percentage of India’s population connected to the internet has more than doubled to 500 million users. And in 2016, India saw more than twice the number of new businesses start as the United States.

With Stripe Atlas, we’ve already been able to help some Indian entrepreneurs build and scale global companies. However, we believe that by operating locally in India—with the ability for Indian companies to connect their local bank accounts to Stripe and get paid out in rupees—we can help support even more businesses and more types of business models (such as local marketplaces) in the years to come.

We’re thrilled to bring the Stripe platform to India and build new products specifically for Indian businesses. (If you’re excited by this challenge, join our engineering team to help us accelerate our progress!)

We’ll slowly add more users to the beta in the next few months to test specific functionality. If you’re interested, you can sign up to stay updated!